Throughout the years, we’ve seen many different systems incentivize all the different kinds of content World of Warcraft has offered in its lifespan. The WoW community is made up of such a large variety of players and the game itself offers some form of content for basically every aspect of its player base.
In Battle For Azeroth, we saw the introduction of Allied Races, which catered to player agency and those who enjoy the leveling experience with the introduction of Heritage Armor. This was intriguing for me, yet also a little off-putting, as someone who has been playing the game since December 2004 and already has every class at max level. So after some self-reflection and pondering around what would entice me to pursue the leveling experience again, I came up with the concept of Character Retirement.
Character Retirement
This is a systems design concept I devised where, upon reaching max level, you have the option to retire a character. Upon doing so, that character will essentially be deleted, but you are also granted some form of a reward for the time and effort you invested into that character. My initial thought was something like a certain amount of gold on the server you leveled that character on, but this could also go the path of cosmetic rewards such as mounts, titles, transmogs, etc, or even something along the lines of enhancing the potency of Heirloom items to improve future leveling. I’d be interested to hear what other reward ideas folks have as well – reply in comments below!
So looking at this system in a practical sense, for my situation – I could take one of the classes I’ve already leveled, say my Gnome Mage who is fresh level 120 (BFA), retire him for some reward (gold or otherwise), and then create a new Nightborne Mage. It provides me some incentive to not only participate in the new content that is the Allied Races and Heritage Armor, but also increases the health of the leveling zones by ultimately increasing the population of players leveling in the Retail experience.
If we look at “leveling” as a type of content, comparable to dungeons, raiding, PvP, or pet battles, this starts to make more sense. The goal with a theme park MMO is to provide a variety of different healthy content experiences so players have the option to invest their time into what they enjoy, while sharing the world with other players in the world. So what this concept of Character Retirement tries to incentivize is leveling as a viable, replayable option of a content loop.
Thinking Forward
Something Warcraft has not done very well historically, but are starting to improve with the introduction of systems like Timewalking, Party Sync, and even Allied Races to an extent, is the goal of making older content viable, healthy, and active on a daily basis. As we look externally, games like Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic demonstrate the potential of how we can leverage scaling and rewards to incentivize the gameplay of older content. In those games, it’s common to see daily or weekly quests that ask you to go to an older zone, dungeon, or raid to complete some objectives for currency used in current end game. If we look at Warcraft, Timewalking is about as close we get to that, with so many systems, content, and countless developer hours just sitting there unused.
Now looping back to Character Retirement, making the leveling experience an incentivized form of content opens a lot of opportunities for the game, as well as the community to leverage. For example, if we look at our friends over at WoW Challenges, their Iron Man competition could greatly benefit from a system such as this, on top of very likely attracting more participation, given the incentive. This is just one example, but if we’ve learned anything about the World of Warcraft community over the years, it’s that they are a creative bunch and the more options you provide, the more creative they will get.
Conclusion
I won’t ramble on any further, as I feel I’ve communicated the concept, as well why I think it would be a positive addition to the game – especially as we move into the level squish and updated leveling experience we will see in Shadowlands. I’m curious what you think – as someone who plays Warcraft, or even if you don’t, what are your thoughts on a system like this that incentivizes the leveling experience? For me, having duplicate classes feels like wasted effort and then deleting a character obviously feels much worse. Share your thoughts in the comments below and let’s have a chat about how we can make this game we love even better moving forward. Thanks guys.